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A German language edition of IAS Plus was launched in February 2005. It offers all English language content of IAS Plus in German translation plus additional content with relevance for Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

Yesterday, IAS PLUS.de reached the milestone of two million unique readers since the start of the page; an average of 55.000 unique readers now go to the site every month. Please click for access to www.iasplus.de.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has published a 2011 update to its Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises.

The Guidelines were last updated in 2000 and include recommendations for responsible business conduct that 42 adhering governments encourage their enterprises to observe wherever they operate.

The 2011 update includes specific consideration of the need for entities to comply with disclosure requirements, both from a financial and non-financial perspective. An extract from the guidelines follows:

General policies

The Principles call on the board of the parent entity to ensure the strategic guidance of the enterprise, the effective monitoring of management and to be accountable to the enterprise and to the shareholders, while taking into account the interests of stakeholders. In undertaking these responsibilities, the board needs to ensure the integrity of the enterprise's accounting and financial reporting systems, including independent audit, appropriate control systems, in particular, risk management, and financial and operational control, and compliance with the law and relevant standards. ...

Disclosure

Enterprises should apply high quality standards for accounting, and financial as well as non-financial disclosure, including environmental and social reporting where they exist. The standards or policies under which information is compiled and published should be reported. An annual audit should be conducted by an independent, competent and qualified auditor in order to provide an external and objective assurance to the board and shareholders that the financial statements fairly represent the financial position and performance of the enterprise in all material respects.

Disclosure is addressed in two areas. The first set of disclosure recommendations calls for timely and accurate disclosure on all material matters regarding the corporation, including the financial situation, performance, ownership and governance of the company. ... The Guidelines also encourage a second set of disclosure or communication practices in areas where reporting standards are still evolving such as, for example, social, environmental and risk reporting. This is particularly the case with greenhouse gas emissions, as the scope of their monitoring is expanding to cover direct and indirect, current and future, corporate and product emissions; biodiversity is another example.

In June 2010, unresolved questions of financing and membership basis had led the Accounting Standards Committee of Germany (ASCG) to terminate, effective 31 December 2010, the standardisation agreement with Germany's Ministry of Justice.

After months of debate and renewed efforts to find sustainable financing, the General Assembly of the ASCG decided yesterday:

to continue the ASCG and to tentatively approve a new structure as sketched out below;

to reform its structure, going from corporate and personal membership to a corporate model where only companies and associations could become members;

to have a trustee board comprising members from all constituent groups (i.e. [corporate] listed preparers, non-listed preparers, banks, insurers, audit firms, and others), which would be charged with setting the broad strategy of the ASCG;

to form a nominating committee comprised by representatives from all constituent groups (members of the trustee board cannot become members of the nominating committee though);

to set up two technical committees comprising a maximum of seven members each with a diverse background; one committee would be charged with IFRSs/international financial reporting matters, the other with German GAAP, respectively; a member's term would usually be five years (staggered terms will apply at the start of the new structure to ensure that not all members leave at the same time) and can be renewed; and

to maintain the current German Accounting Standards Board and its interpretative arm, the Accounting Interpretations Committee (AIC), until the new committees have been formed and are ready to start working (presumably 1 October 2011).

The IASB has uploaded to its site an article on the financing of IFRS Foundation.

Financial journalist Robert Bruce, who is also the regular resident commentator for IAS Plus, discusses the need for the IFRS Foundation to raise effective and sufficient funding but at the same time ensure its independence is not impaired.

Further to our earlier story, a special edition Dbriefs webcast is being held on 13 June 2011 to discuss the recent U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) workplan update about International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

The SEC workplan update raises important questions for financial executives of U.S. companies, including what it suggests about the potential new requirements and how companies should respond. The webcast will discuss:

What the SEC update really means

How the update is expected to impact the FASB's and IASB's convergence efforts

A possible timeline for IFRS adoption in the United States

What U.S. companies could consider doing now to prepare.

Full details of the webcast are provided below:

Topic:

IFRS: What Does the Latest SEC Update Mean for You?

Date and time:

Monday, 13 June 2011 at 02:00pm-3:30pm United States Eastern Daylight Time (GMT-05:00)

The Sustainability Group of the Federation of European Accountants (FEE) has issued a guide to commonly used sustainability reporting guidance documents when considering the identification and use of environmental, social and governance (ESG) indicators.

The guidance documents selected by the FEE were based on relevance, involvement of European accountancy national institutions, international applicability, and range of technical observations at the international level. Due to a lack of consistency between the documents, FEE suggests a need to find a common methodology on how to use the various documents. In order to reduce the risk of missing material and relevant key performance indicators when deciding what information should be reported, FEE recommends an entity should use the following criteria: relevance, materiality, consistency and reliability.

Accounting Roundup — Special Edition (PDF 238k) – contains status summaries of some of the key FASB/IASB joint and FASB-only projects and includes references to Deloitte Heads Up newsletters providing more specifics about each project

Deloitte refers to one or more of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, a UK private company limited by guarantee (“DTTL”), its network of member firms, and their related entities. DTTL and each of its member firms are legally separate and independent entities. DTTL (also referred to as “Deloitte Global”) does not provide services to clients. Please see www.deloitte.com/about for a more detailed description of DTTL and its member firms.

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